Analysing differences between business process similarity measures

Abstract

Nowadays, it is not uncommon that organisations maintain repositories containing hundreds or thousands of business process models. For the purpose of searching such a repository for models that are similar to a query model, many similarity measures have been suggested in the literature. Other measures have been suggested for different purposes like measuring compliance between a model and a reference model. As those similarity measures differ in many aspects, it is an interesting question how they rank "similarity" within the same set of process models. In our study, we investigated, how different kinds of changes in a process model influence the values of 22 different similarity measures that have been published in academic literature. Furthermore, we identified eight properties that a similarity measure should have from a theoretical point of view and analysed how these properties are fulfilled by the different measures. Our results show that there are remarkable differences among existing measures. We give some recommendations which kind of measure is useful for which kind of application. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.